This paper is the third in a series concerned with the level of access provided to deaf and hard of hearing children who rely on interpreters to access classroom communication. The first two papers focused on the accuracy and intelligibility of educational interpreters who use Cued Speech (CS); this study examines the accuracy of those who use…

Signing systems that attempted to represent spoken language via manual signs -- some invented, and some borrowed from natural sign languages -- have historically been used in classrooms with deaf children. However, despite decades of research and use of these systems in the classroom, there is little evidence supporting their educational…

This article explores the available research literature on language development and language interventions among deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) children. This literature is divided into two broad categories: Research on natural languages (specifically American Sign Language and spoken English) and research on communication systems (specifically…

The basic impoverishment of deafness is not lack of hearing but lack of language. To illustrate this, we have only to compare a 4-year-old hearing child, with a working vocabulary of between 2,000 and 3,000 words, to a child of the same age, profoundly deaf since infancy, who may have only a few words at his command. Even more important than…

Examines and rejects the theory that the deaf have access to a "phonological" code. Recommends that if deaf children are to be introduced to a manual system of communication, it should be the syntactically adequate Paget-Gorman system. (Author/FL)

Factorial invariance of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) when administered to deaf children who use sign language was studied with 110 children and the WISC-III standardization sample of 2,200 children. Path coefficients, error variances, and factor covariances were not invariant, indicating that test…

To examine the relationship of impulse control in deaf children to parent hearing status, manual communication, and academic achievement, 324 deaf children (6-10 years old) were given a battery of tests. (DLS)

Examined were message-receiving skills of schoolchildren in relation to their mother's messages. Participants were hearing children four, six, and eight years of age and deaf children six to 10 years of age. Findings revealed that mothers achieved high levels of communicative success with their six- and eight-year-old hearing children but…

Examined the development of communicative competence in deaf children and its interactions with use of communicative gestures and/or words. Data indicated (1) the use of communicative gestures increased with age while speech remained constant; and (2) the number of gestures used correlated with communicative accuracy. Difficulty level influenced…

Study indicates that hearing impaired residential students are more proficient users of American Sign Language than are hearing impaired children enrolled in local, public school programs, and older such residential students are more proficient in the language than are younger students. (SL)

This study investigated the ability of two groups of profoundly deaf students (N=40 and ages 8, 11, 14, and 17), using either oral or signed communication, to employ pragmatic skills required for effective face-to-face interactions. Notable differences in pragmatic skills were found between the groups and between deaf and normal hearing students.…

Two experiments compared signed and written stories by deaf 7- to 15-year-olds with oral and written stories by hearing age-mates. Found that the signed and oral stories had similar discourse structures as indicated by patterns of causal goal-action-outcome episodes. The grammatical and lexical character of deaf students' written stories lagged…

The comprehension of 30 severely and profoundly deaf students (ages 10 to 17) was evaluated under 11 communication conditions involving individual and combined presentations of lipreading, listening, fingerspelling, and signed English. Severely deaf students scored higher than profoundly deaf students under all but one condition, and all students…

THE ILLINOIS COMMUNICATION SCALE WAS DEVELOPED ON 16 MM COLOR FILM TO ASSESS THE RECEPTIVE COMMUNICATION ABILITIES OF DEAF CHILDREN BETWEEN 6 AND 14 YEARS. FORMS WERE CONSTRUCTED TO MEASURE (1) AUDITORY RECEPTION, (2) LIPREADING AND LISTENING, (3) LIPREADING ONLY, (4) FINGERSPELLING, AND (5) LANGUAGE OF SIGNS. EACH FORM HAD 5 SUBPARTS (1)…